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Shelley Fralic: Ignorance over mammograms perplexing

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, filled with campaigns getting the word out all over North America. Yet as a recent poll indicates, there are still many women who aren’t aware that a mammogram might save their life, or the life of a loved one.

Photograph by: mf coallier
, Marie-France Coallier

It has been called the sexy disease, one assumes because it involves body parts that our modern culture has decided are less about anthropological utility and more about, shall we say, physical titillation.

It’s one of the reasons, it has long been suggested, that there is so much awareness about breast cancer, about its pervasiveness and about its too-often devastating outcome.

And that, perhaps, is a good thing.

Not so good is the recent startling news that nearly half of the women surveyed in a Canadian Cancer Society poll in Ontario were unaware that mammograms are the key to early breast cancer detection.

Nearly half the women. Not aware that a mammogram — a free and readily available examination — might save their life, or the life of a loved one.

The same poll found that more than half of the women didn’t know when to start getting mammograms, and that one in five who should be getting a mammogram — typically, those between the ages of 50 and 69 — had not had one in the past two years.

This in the face of the common knowledge that breast cancer is the second leading cancer killer of Canadian women (lung cancer trumps it), and is expected to strike a total of 24,000 women this year alone, killing 5,000.

How is it possible in this age of saturated communication — where Breast in a Boat and pink ribbon campaigns and races for the cure dominate the news and where the Angelina Jolies, Sharon Osbournes and Christina Applegates of pop culture openly discuss their mastectomies — that so many women are so clueless.

In fact, there is so much hype about breast cancer that other charities trying to raise funds and awareness for other cancers have been known to complain that breast cancer — or what is called pink ribbon culture — hogs the spotlight, along with the donations and research. Unsexy prostate cancer, for instance, which is the third-leading cause of male cancer deaths, is also expected to hit nearly 24,000 Canadian men this year, with nearly 4,000 expected to die.

If breast cancer is such an on-the-radar health issue, if it is so pervasively communicated to the masses, why, at least according to the CCS survey, are so many women so ignorant about the preventive benefits of mammogram screening?

It’s a question worth asking, especially as October brings us another official Breast Cancer Awareness Month, filled with campaigns getting out the word all over North America.

It seems unbelievable that one single Canadian woman could have escaped the news that since mammograms became the norm 30 years ago, aided by the introduction of free screening programs across the country, including B.C., the rate of death from the disease has dropped by more than one-third.

This, of course, is not to ignore the concerns about exposure to radiation, or the debate about the efficacy of mammograms and their ability to detect all abnormalities. Or that other studies show that South Asian Canadians, and other immigrants, are shockingly under-represented in screening programs in general, suggesting cultural impediments. Or that mammograms aren’t the only detection method one should employ, but should be part of a regular routine that includes both self and clinical examinations.

Admittedly, I have a personal reason for such frustration with that Ontario survey. My breast lump was detected decades ago, when I was in my 30s, and proved benign. I wrote a column about it at the time, and have dutifully been in the provincial screening program since 1992. But my mother, who was 61 when my lump was found, had never had a mammogram even though her mother, my grandmother, died from breast cancer. After my mother read that column, she went to get a mammogram (without telling anyone) and not long after that I got a call from her. She was in St. Vincent’s hospital and had just had a partial mastectomy.

Today, she is a hale 86, and cancer-free — because she had a mammogram.

Here, too, is what may be the scariest statistic of all from that poll. Despite their professed lack of awareness about the saving grace of mammograms, and despite their reluctance to embrace the relatively breezy life-saving procedure, 88 per cent of those women surveyed last August said they knew someone who had been diagnosed with breast cancer.

October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, filled with campaigns getting the word out all over North America. Yet as a recent poll indicates, there are still many women who aren’t aware that a mammogram might save their life, or the life of a loved one.

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